EP21. GENES TO HAPPINESS TO GOD

GENES TO HAPPINESS TO GOD

Kevin Sharpe

Those who find salvation become some of the happiest people around, research suggests.

Oh happy days, Oh happy days,
When Jesus washed all our sins away.

Many spiritual traditions would agree.

Yet most of us feel happy and satisfied with life, whether Jesus saves us or not. From surveys of 1.1 million people from all over the globe, psychologists David Myers of Hope College, Michigan, and Ed Diener of the University of Illinois, conclude in the May 1966 issue of Scientific American that we mostly describe ourselves as "pretty happy." Ninety-three percent feel happy (which includes very happy, pretty happy, and moderately happy) as opposed to sad or neutral. Happiness appears not to rely significantly on external factors: our economic class, age, gender, education, or race. Neither does it depend on how the researchers gather their data.

What does happiness depend on?

For each of us, our happiness fluctuates within a small range that our genes largely determine. So concludes molecular biologist Dean Hamer of the National Cancer Institute in his October 1996 review in Nature Genetics of studies on the role of genes in happiness or misery.

Identical twins (those with the same genetic makeup) attain the same level of happiness 44 percent of the time, according to research at the University of Minnesota. In comparison, fraternal twins, those who share genes as do ordinary siblings, reach the same level only eight percent of the time. Hamer adds: "These data show that the broad heritability of well-being is 40 to 50%." Studies by David Lykken and Auke Tellegen assess the happiness of twins over five to ten years, and show the slight impact of sex, age, race, and marital status, and the short-term influence of job loss or lottery winning. Other studies have shown that a person's level of happiness remains stable over many years. Inherited genes account for the majority of this level.

"How you feel right now is about equally genetic and circumstantial," says Hamer. "But how you will feel on average over the next ten years is fully 80% because of your genes."

A clash looms between those who adhere to biology and explain things genetically, and those who explain things spiritually – Jesus washes our sins away and God's grace showers us with happiness.

Biology places the responsibility for our states of happiness or misery on our genes. It helps explain more about well-being than this, too. Hamer directs our attention to two of the more than 300 known neurotransmitters, dopaminesthe brain's chemical for pleasuresand serotonin, the neurochemical for misery. Neurotransmitters pass information from the synapse or junction between a nerve cell and another nerve cell or a muscle. The nerve cell's bulbous end releases them from storage when an electrical impulse moving along the nerve reaches it. Then they cross the junction to dock at the other nerve cell's receptor, and either prompt or inhibit the impulses along the second cell. The first nerve cell reabsorbs excess neurotransmitters, but not necessarily all of them. Those that remain free floating help create our happy or miserable states of being.

Genes carry the instructions for the construction of neurotransmitters, their receptor and reabsorption portals. They also impart information on such things as their storage and release rates. Hence, genes can influence the prevalence, scarcity, and activity of serotonin and dopamine, and, in turn, whatever behaviors and feelings these neurotransmitters induce.

Psychology looks at what we do that activates our happinesssstellar sex or delicious dinners. Another science, evolutionary psychology, tells us of the origin of happiness. It suggests the circumstances and reasons natural selection and genetic mutation cooperated in our evolutionary past to produce well-being. Thus other sciences than behavioral genetics and neuroscience inform this discussion.

Religions and their philosophies focus on happiness:

Popular spiritual leader Robert Schuller writes about The Be Happy Attitudes: Eight Positive Attitudes that Can Transform Your Life. Along with charismatic and pentecostal tendencies in contemporary western religion, such books and movements assume that religion intends for happiness.
Highly religious people declare themselves very happy at twice the rate of those with the lowest spiritual commitment, according to a Gallup survey referred to by Myers and Diener. A study of 166,600 people in fourteen countries demonstrates that happiness and satisfaction with life increase with frequency of attendance at worship services. Why is this? Researchers point to the social support and hopefulness entailed in religious affiliation.
Believers might say their happiness arises from God who wants them to feel this way. Reformation protestants focussed on justification by grace through faith. They believed that through this grace we could share what God offers, a positive loving action. The Bible presents a picture, to their eyes, of a gracious and loving deity who desires everyone's happiness.
Saint Augustine accepted the basic tenet of the ancients' ethical theory: we should aim our behavior toward the achievement of well-being or happiness, the only universal desire.

Other religious traditions and churches emphasize more the promise of happiness to come:

In Christian orthodoxy, happiness lies elsewhere, somewhere of original bliss and innocence (the Garden of Eden) or of future bliss (Heaven, our eternal and happy home where we'll see God face-to-face, or the Promised Land where we'll find happiness and complete satisfaction). A friend with a staunch Roman Catholic upbringing talks of her constant sinning because she fails to say grace before every meal and pray every night and go to church as often as possible. She must overcome this tendency through acts of penance to achieve happiness in the afterlife.
Buddhist and Hindu scriptures alike advocate withdrawal from the world of pleasure. Spiritually mature people abandon desires, lose their appetite for joys, and withdraw from their senses. The Buddha preached life as suffering. If you accept the intrinsic sorrow of life and observe the his teachings, you will find happiness.

Whether achieved in this life or in an afterlife, religions usually ascribe happiness to divine action. Do sciences like behavior genetics mean the genes of those whom Jesus saves predispose them toward great happiness? Perhaps spiritual commitment and experience draw people with these genes, maybe especially when something blocks their happiness. Do genes and neurotransmitters relate to an afterlife? More pointedly, what do these sciences say about the truth claims involved in religious experience and involvement, including the activity of God in people's lives? Divine deeds and biological biases seem incompatible as explanations.

Religious believers may well try, then, to ignore or rebut claims for the genetic basis of happiness. Several paths open to them. Divine grace and will or human will, they might claim, figure more in happiness than does biology. They set up a dualism: on one side lies the mind with its feelings, and on the other lies the brain with its neurotransmitters. The spirit in the machine. Perhaps they might exact a special spiritual status for happiness, which they thereby divorce from the biological stuff of genes and brains.

Several claims for the genetic basis of various behaviors run into trouble because follow-up studies fail to replicate the original research. In a 14 October 1996 Newsweek article, journalist Sharon Begley refers to four such claims, and the other two she mentions (Hamer's one on happiness and a yet-to-be published one on neuroticism) await their follow-ups. The reader might conclude from her reporting that genetic-basis research carries a poor track record and merits skepticism. Yet Begley fails to mention other gene-behavior studies, most of which haven't meet their Waterloo. On the other hand, the failure of researchers to replicate any study does sound against it. And we should approach with caution those studies for which follow-ups have yet to appear.

Begley also refers to an often-raised suspicion of twin studies. Identical twins frequently dress alike and create a private world for just the two of them. People treat them alike too. Fraternal twins, on the other hand, typically behave no more alike than other siblings. Identicals thus share more influences from their environment, according to biologist Marcus Feldman from Stanford University, which in turn means their happiness levels would show a greater similarity. But this criticism overlooks a technique employed in twin studies, including the one on happiness. Researchers not only look at identical twins reared together, but also at those separated at birth and reared apart. The environments of the subjects in these split-twin studies would differ. But the results of such investigations, at least in those concerning well-being, reinforce those conducted with non-split identical twins.

Other critics say that behavior geneticists like Hamer try to reduce the wholistic human experience of happiness to nothing but the actions of genes and electrical activity and chemicals. They thereby push anti-reductionism and claim that geneticists and their popularizers ignore the real subjective realm. Behavior genetics oversimplifies the reality.

Yet Hamer's and his colleagues' work suggests genes provide only a percentage of input into a behavior. "Though genes may determine our average [level] of happiness, they don't specify where we are within our individual range at any particular point in time." We and our circumstances can affect how we feel here and now. But, whatever else may influence well-being, genes still play a part, probably a significant part. To observe this doesn't mean adopting a determinist approach to the research; all human traits involve environment and individual willfulness, as well as genes.

Neither ought spiritual thinkers play a wait-and-see game: we'll only approach these studies seriously when someone else adequately answers all possible criticisms. While later research may modify the results of the gene studies, the bulk and tone of the work will probably remain. I suspect more and more evidence will mount to show a genetic basissalong with an environmental basissfor such traits as happiness. Given the rate of progress with the human genome project, before too long research may unravel the complex of genes that produce happiness. It will catch spiritual thinkers unthinking.

The problem is more serious than this sounds, an academic exercise. The human genome project will (and does) connect behaviors such as happiness, as well as diseases and physical traits, with particular clusters of genes. How will society and entrepreneurs use this knowledge? What constitutes misuse of this information? Current genetic engineering of plants and animals presents a challenge only in its infancy.

Apart from an occasional glance through its ethics spectacles, religion ignores this work. Theologians, religionists, ethicists, and philosophers could constructively engage the scientific findings and their implications for spiritual beliefs. They should. When the conclusions of the human genome project pour upon us with their ethical, philosophical, and spiritual implications, theologians should find themselves well prepared and knee-deep in the discussion.

I see no signs of this happening. Spiritual thinkers continue to deny the potential usefulness of behavior genetics with more science bashing, continued ignoring of science, and segregation of subjective qualities like happiness from the physical world of genes. Such dualism allows for the further irrelevance of religion for daily life. (A recent study on judging risk, reported in the 28 September 1996 issue of New Scientist, shows that British people trust the word of scientists 59 percent of the time, but religious organizations 22 percent.)

We either enjoy happiness or we don't. We can control some of the circumstantial factors of our current state of happiness, but 20 percent over the long run leaves little for God or us to change. I hope theologians refrain from a God-can-change-the-genes response. If God works toward our happiness, rule out interventions as the way God employs. And I hope theologians resist the temptation to wipe happiness off God's agenda; of all things, well-being lures as the most common goal toward which we strive.

God may want us to feel happy, but we should cease thinking of well-being as a moral quality we should aspire to. What does that leave for the theologian to ruminate about over God and happiness? I suggest we look at the nature of God and God's relationship with the universe and with humans as part of creation. If we take all this stuff about genes and behavior seriously, we need to revisit the human images we project onto God. The genetic and neurotransmitter basis of happiness suggests God feels neither happiness nor sadness. This means a reconstruction of our idea of God.

Similarly, the gene studies indicate we can't hope for happiness in an afterlife; happiness is a mental state brought about by neurotransmitters and these things disintegrate with our bodies. A nonphysical form of happiness generates as little sense as a nonphysical digestive tract. Metaphorical reinterpretations of happiness lose touch with reality as well-being depends so much on biology.

But then we empty meaning out of life if we give up all hope of images and opt for the extreme of saying nothing about God or the afterlife. We need to think more deeply about the nature of God and the afterlife.

One approach to this need for theological reconstruction starts by thinking of God as the totality of all that exist, the universe-as-a-whole. This whole resembles other wholes we experience. The Democratic Party possesses a spirit, a system of belief, and a life which includes but transcends the spirit of President Clinton and his system of beliefs and his life, and those of all other of its members. How does happiness then relate to God as the universe-as-a-whole?

President Clinton is a member of the Democratic Party, and, in a similar way, happiness is a property of God. As we are part of the universe-as-a-whole, of God, our happiness is also a property of Godsbut happiness thought of differently from ours. The party influences the President and the President the party. Our happiness influences God and God influences our happiness. The party enfolds the political attitudes of Clinton and creates something more of them, something that reflects the history of the party, its stated ideals, and the attitudes of everyone in it. It transcends Clinton. Similarly, God's "happiness" includes but goes beyond our experience of happiness. It relates to ours but exceeds ours in a wholistic way that embraces and transcends what we experience as any whole transcends its parts.

The task then becomes to describe transcended happiness. To do this, look at the wholes we experience. In particular, look at the way the properties of the parts of a whole become, when it transcends them, properties of it. Do this for various wholes. Then extend this knowledge to create models for the way the universe-as-a-whole, God, relates to its parts. Lastly, evaluate the various models for the God-universe relationship that the different types of whole-parts associations produce.

This will help us rebuild theology to make more sense of happiness and other human characteristics as attributes of God. It will also help us reconceive afterlife since it too involves the wholeness inherent in the universe-as-a-whole.

The genes-happiness-God debate provokes more than the nature-of-God question and solution. Suppose we believe in the example and teachings of Jesus Christ and the witness of the Hebraic tradition. Then we think God produced the universe and ussthe method for which we describe with science, including that of behavior geneticssand that God wants us to strive to maximize the happiness of other people. This will mean trying to remove the barriers to justice and equality that some people experience. Such conditions depress a person's level of happiness. It may even mean trying to change the behaviors of people whose source of happiness (excessive TV or rich food, for instance) leads to less happiness and can destroy their lives and those of many around them. We could turn our attention to the greater destroyers such as addiction to tobacco, hard drugs, or alcohol.

We need to take seriously and decline to shelve or rebuff such claims as the genetic basis of subjective traits like happiness. While the details of the science may change, the challenge to theology and ethics will remain. The demand digs deeply into theological thought. We may need to reconstruct our understanding of God and God's relationship with the universe.